Away, #PelotonGate, and predictions for 2020

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Kate and Alex and the ever-intrepid man behind the dials, Chris, took the time this week to dig into the two biggest stories from the end of 2019 and look into the future. But as you’ll quickly hear, there was news on the show. Kate Clark is moving on from Equity and TechCrunch to The Information. We wish her nothing but the best but it’s still a big blah to say goodbye all the same. (A big congrats to the folks at The Information, Kate’s tremendous.)

But we still had Kate this week, so here’s a short rundown of what we talked about as a team:

• The Away fiasco: We’ve discussed Away on the show a number of times, but this time it wasn’t for something good. The company found itself in the midst of a media firestorm about how it treated its staff. The first story led to follow-on coverage, the earlier-than-internally-expected exit of the company’s CEO, and more. Also in the conversation was the question of whether CEOs who are women are held to higher standards than men. After all, overbearing male CEOs in startupland is a tale as old as startups themselves.
• #Pelotongate: We couldn’t help but chat a bit about everyone’s favorite Christmas-time brand meltdown. And as Peloton was a 2019 IPO, it still fits in our private company wheelhouse. Or at least closely enough. Expect more eyes than usual on the exercise company’s next earnings report.

We then turned to predictions, taking a turn apiece to detail what we thought was coming up in 2020. Traditionally, Equity is somewhat poor at making predictions that actually come true, so we roped our producer in to help talk about the future. He is, after all, the person in the world who has listened to more Equity than anyone else in the world.

What’s ahead for Equity in our post-Kate future? We have a huge 2020 planned. We have new formats, new hosts, new guests and more coming your way. So don’t worry, Alex and Chris are still around and the show will go on! (Check TechCrunch.com next Monday for more.)